“… filling this hall in such numbers to be startled, astounded, astonished, seeking not the satisfaction of curiosity but stimulation for the heart and mind. And so, my friends, now shall you have it.”
She lowered the phonograph arm and the Boswell Sisters sang “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.” Gestures dappled the screen.
BEFORE the astonishing film, it had been two-cent stamps sold through a classified ad: “Color portrait engraving of George Washington. Send your $2 now! P.O.B. 3G, Ansonia Station, N.Y.”; before that Love Lockets peddled on amusement piers from Norfolk to Myrtle Beach to Mobile; before that a turf advisory service that once too often gaffed a dentist with connections. Dumas served not quite half of an eighteen-month sentence at Sing Sing. His cellmate, Monk Dershowitz, the Club Royale killer, knew interesting card tricks.
And some while before that, on the veranda of a Sarasota hotel overlooking the Gulf, Dumas and Lady Elaine had met for the first time. They were at separate tables with coffee and rolls and striated butter curls on ice. They wore white: his plus-fours and pullover, her silk blouse and aeronaut’s jodhpurs.
At that time, to everyone but the natives, Florida was novel, exotic, a tropical backdrop even the dullest might play against, granting equally to Buick dealer and tycoon grounds for sport and a climate for folly. Banjo bands and coon dancers roamed Sarasota; the Asola Theater had been rebuilt out of constituent parts sent from Venice.
“May I join you?”
“I don’t mind.” She smiled while hiding her teeth.
Dumas looked past the hawk nose and into her deep-green eyes.
She was first to turn away. “You must be dressed for golf,” she said. “It couldn’t be a lovelier day.”
“No, no. Billiards is my game.”
She thought: He’s not so much older than me. In his forties, or perhaps a bit more.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I’ve always been at my best indoors.”
There was something like bergamot in her perfume. Dumas offered a cigarette. They lied readily to each other for several minutes.
“Would it be rude to order champagne at this hour?”
“I don’t mind,” she’d said.
“MARRY me.” Dumas cut the salt air with the stiff white brim of his hat.
South of Coos Bay, still half a day from the California line, they’d stopped for razor clams and a game of miniature golf. Lady Elaine had just stroked the ball under a lighthouse — its wire form showing through cracks in light blue cement — round a banked turn, off a pipe rail at two sharp angles, and into the cup.
“You’re such a ham,” she said.
Lady Elaine wore her dark glasses. The bulb enclosed in the lighthouse blinked invisibly in direct sun.
“Have I ever once teased you with this in twelve years?”
“No, never. And don’t spoil the record now.”
“Now is late.”
His shy sobriety frightened her.
“Shall I drive?”
“I mean in the game. Late in the game.”
“Come on, you need a drink.”
Dumas touched her face. “I mean it’s something we should do before we get too tired. Before we get to where it won’t matter.” She looked out at the unreasonable tumbling of the sea. “Let’s make for Nevada and you can think about it on the way.”
“I already am. I’m remembering what it took to get free of my last husband.”
Dumas reseated his hat. “Nobody but me will ask you, and I won’t again.”
“I don’t mind.”
Lady Elaine thought of the little whore. Down a road black with rain, unconsciously clicking the headlights from dim to bright to dim and back again, she felt her heart change.
DEVELOPMENT
LIGHT-HEADED FROM SILENCE, BRICK stopped in Canyon City to have the car monogrammed. A Sioux in watch cap and coveralls appraised him as a surgeon might. Gesturing, they arrived at a figure. The Sioux had piano player’s hands.
Raptors floated on thermals that rose from the parking lot. Brick, who deplored pathos, began to count in his head. Observe geology. Check tire pressure. Take photos: distancing factor. He bought pemmican and crackers from a vending machine that beeped twelve bars of Gershwin, G. Cautiously approaching the municipal beach, he saw it was deserted, and crouched in the shade of styrene palm leaves to eat.
Monotony of the waves.
Gull talk.
What continued to bother him was that analog wiring, one thing always leading to another: intricate rake trails in the sand furnishing the notes for a Japanese temple courtyard. He missed the clarity of no connections, of ignorance. And he continued to suspect that someone else had control, that he was being moved from panel to panel like a man in a comic strip.
How long and how far? How many stolen hotel towels?
Brick could not remember preparing for this trip, let alone on what day and in what city it had begun. He did remember waking up behind the wheel, having slept only for a second, then swerving past the reflective eyes of a large mammal, and over median grass. How much luck had that used up?
The white Gothic B’s to right and left of the hood scoop were, Brick realized only now, wrong side round to his view. He checked the expressions of oncoming drivers, for whom it was right side up, but these were unreadable.
Well, he could adjust.
That was the idea of travel, anyway.
On the far outskirts of Ciudad Radiofonica, he pulled over for a girl with a sign charcoaled, “Pilgrimage to Family Crypt.”
“How far you going?”
“Le Havre.”
Close up, it was easy to see that the pigtails and pinafore were an affectation, that she was quite a bit older than she was trying to seem.
“Brick Bradford,” he said, opening his hand. “Chemist, explorer, tight end.”
“The name is Boots.”
“And you’re on a pilgrimage.”
“Oh, that’s just a gimmick,” she said irritably. “I won this tour in an essay contest sponsored by the Optimists Club. I wrote ‘Emergency Styling: A Sonata in Verbs.’ But I discover some empty promises, like yesterday, this allegedly prepaid hotel, my room key won’t go through the wax they’ve jammed in the lock, and I have to skip. Real hospitality. Am I talking too much?”
Hedgerows had given way to olive groves and low, drylaid stone walls. Cattle egrets flew up out of a ditch. A boy led a gray donkey laden with firewood. The donkey’s expression said: I am not here.
They stopped at a trattoria with outdoor tables and ordered clam salad. Bright plastic soft drink crates were stacked against the fence. Across the road, on the one remaining wall of a house destroyed by fire, posters for a ninja film had been pasted upside down.
Brick wiped his plate clean with bread. “Do you believe in coincidence?” he said.
“I never ask myself.”
“How about destiny? Do you believe in destiny? That we’re really not in charge?”
“I ignore that.”
She spoke too slowly, too carefully, for these responses not to have been learned in advance.
“Is it true that sharks never sleep?” he said in the next panel, by way of experiment.
“Too obvious.” She pushed out her lower lip.
“What color are my eyes?” he said, covering them with his hands.
“Too romantic,” she said, taking her musette bag and slithering through the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway.
By the time Brick understood that she would not come back out, had ditched him via the back door, crickets were sounding, wild thyme aroma had vanished behind tour bus exhaust, and blue Xmas bulbs glowed along the roofline. His incoherent revenge was to run out on the check.
In the center of the right front seat, as if deliberately placed, and so demanding to be read, was a sheet of bond paper folded into an airplane: